The Bedbug (5 page)

But the Frenchman survived, adopted the name Jules-Césard and married the royal midwife, Concordia Groppe from Germany. They produced between them seventeen children. Among them was yet another Nicholas, who qualified as an architect and married Camilla Cavos. Her grandfather, the composer Catterino
Cavos, had been brought up in a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice and was director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Her father was an architect.

Thus there came into being a great theatrical and architectural dynasty. Nicholas Benois, the architect, had as his patrons the Empress Maria Federovna and Tsar Nicholas I. He worked on the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and collaborated with his father-in-law, Alberto Cavos, on the design of the Mariinsky Theatre. Three of his nine children were closely connected with the arts. Albert, the oldest boy, was a thrice-married philanderer and an artist whose water colours were popular in the Royal household. He was eclipsed by his younger brother Alexandre.

Leontij Benois was the least flamboyant of the three, an architect whose best works were civic and business buildings in a Renaissance style. He enjoyed a reputation as a consummate teacher, holding first a professorship and then becoming Rector at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. He had married Maria Sapojhikova, daughter of a wealthy merchant who ran fisheries on the Volga River.

Leontij’s most famous artistic moment came in 1909 when he put on show a ‘lost’ Leonardo da Vinci painting of the Madonna and Child which he had inherited from his grandfather Alberto Cavos. Family legend maintained that Alberto had acquired it from a band of itinerant actors. It caused a sensation and Tsar Nicholas II eventually offered $1.5 million to acquire it for The Hermitage museum. Comparing exchange rates over time can lead to wildly differing results but even on the basis, using a reputable academic calculator, that it was the equivalent of £310,000 at the time, it represents £26 million at twenty-first century prices. But the payment was to be made in instalments and after the Bolshevik revolution the new regime reneged on the deal while keeping the painting.

At the time of the painting’s first appearance, Leontij’s youngest daughter Nadia was thirteen years old and growing up in luxurious
surroundings on Vasilievsky Island, the most fashionable quarter of St Petersburg. She could have had little expectation of the terrible events which were to shatter her comfortable existence, nor of the strange ‘Dutchman’ who would eventually come to her rescue.

Vasilievsky Island was laid out on a grid system. Leontij, who had designed some of the buildings, had a house at Number 20 in the Third Line. As Nadia got older and followed the family tradition by enrolling at the Academy of Arts, she became a frequent visitor at the home of her uncle Alexandre at Number 38 in the First Line, overlooking the Bolshoi Theatre. There she would be likely to meet the composers Sergei Prokofiev and Alexander Tcherepnin, playing the grand piano, or her cousin Nicholas, to whom she was briefly engaged to be married. He later became design director of La Scala in Milan. Prokofiev was in his early twenties, closer to Nadia’s age than Alexandre’s, but the two men collaborated on ballet productions and became good friends. The composer was a regular guest at the Benois’s Thursday night ‘At Home’ parties and had attended a boisterous New Year celebration.
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At that time, St Petersburg was growing faster than any other in Europe as the industrial revolution began to take hold in a country still mainly populated by peasants and serfs. Peter the Great’s careful town planning was overwhelmed as factories sprung up everywhere: engineering works for railways and heavy artillery; cotton mills and factories. They produced enormous wealth and lavish spending. The Tsar subsidised the Mariinsky to the tune of two and half million gold roubles a year. The nightlife rivalled that in Paris, elegant restaurants like Donon’s, Palkin, Barel, and the Bear abounded. European fashions were brought hotfoot from the salons of Paris and London, and demand for the creations of the jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé kept 700 craftsmen busy.
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Nadia’s friend Tamara Abelson, a merchant’s daughter growing up in the city during this period, recalls delicious cakes from the French confectioner Ballet; Einem sweets from Berlin; Druce’s, the English shop at the top of the Nevsky Prospekt, the equivalent
of Harrods; and Eliseev’s great emporium where exotic groceries were imported from East and West and caviar was sold from large wooden barrels.
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Beyond the heights of excess though, the warning signs were already present. Among the city’s population of 2.2 million, three quarters were peasants and many of them were starving. Revolution was in the air long before the military follies of the Russian generals in the early years of the First World War left the mass of the population still more deprived. Nadia Benois and Tamara Abelson were witness to the terrors of 1917. Yet so oblivious were the privileged to their imminent fate that on the night before the Revolution started, in February 1917, with the army starved of munitions and the people starved of bread, a theatre critic emerging from a particularly lavish production could talk of going to a restaurant ‘to eat nightingales’ tongues and let the hungry bastards howl’.
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Faced with a wave of workers’ strikes and demonstrations, Tsar Nicholas II signed a telegram on 25 February 1917 instructing his military commanders to restore order but their efforts quickly collapsed in the face of mutiny and, at the beginning of March, Nicholas abdicated. Tamara Abelson recalled how bands of trigger-happy youths burst into wealthy homes ostensibly searching for arms and enemies of the people. No one dared refuse them admission:

In our house they passed from one room to another, opening cupboards and drawers, removing anything they fancied while commenting loudly and disparagingly on what they saw, glorifying in their power … Regardless of these and similar outrages, a feeling of hope, of faith in the future, of a rebirth, pervaded the capital.
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During the summer months the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky struggled to assert some kind of authority. But with much of the army and navy joining the workers in looting
indiscriminately in the stores, palaces and townhouses, fuelled by alcohol from the best private cellars, life began to fall apart. In October, with troops refusing to obey orders and sailors bringing the cruiser Aurora up the River Neva to train its guns on the on the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand.

Novelist Aleksey Tolstoy described what happened next:

The icy wind sent its icy breath into the darkened windows of the houses and blew through the deserted porches, sweeping out the ghosts of past luxury … It was terrible, incomprehensible, inconceivable. Everything was being abolished. … God, private property and the very right to live as one pleased.
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For many of the well-to-do, the first instinct was to flee the horror they now beheld. In the next four years almost 2 million departed, usually believing their exile would be brief and the old order would be restored. They were the White Russians, monarchists and social democrats; business leaders, scientists and increasingly those from the world of arts who discovered that the new regime did not welcome freedom of expression. The stark choice was penury at home or penury in exile. They were permitted to withdraw only a few hundred roubles from their bank accounts, and expected to contribute their wealth and belongings to the welfare of the proletariat. Gold and other precious metals and jewels were liable to confiscation, a black market in art works flourished. Hyperinflation made the paper rouble worthless and the economy reverted to barter.

Despite their bourgeois lifestyles, with wealth and privilege that marked them out as targets for the revenge of the proletariat, Alexandre and Leontij Benois stayed and survived. As Alexandre later pointed out, they had not a drop of Russian blood in their veins yet they
were
Russian, by citizenship, language and way of life.
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Alexandre remained, as curator of Old Masters at the Hermitage, until 1926 when he joined the procession of Russian exiles that
gravitated to Paris. Leontij, after a period of turmoil, was able to retain his professorship and continue teaching until his death in 1928. That is not to say that life continued as normal: the capacious apartments on Vasilievsky Island were requisitioned and had to be shared with a host of revolutionaries who were billeted on them. Leontij grieved over the loss of his summer house in Peterhof, communal living with strangers in his once cosy apartment and most of all the parting with three of his children who fled Russia altogether to escape hunger and other dangers.
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In December 1919, the writer Maxim Gorky took over what had been the magnificent Eliseev emporium, on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika River embankment, and turned it into a haven for writers, artists and musicians. Their gilded life was gone for ever but they could still live it up a little at the House of Arts, as it was officially known. Fine costumes and caviar were not on offer but alcohol was still available and on Friday nights the ragged aesthetes could forget the hard times as Albert Benois played Strauss waltzes on the piano. The building, when lit up at night, resembled the prow of an ocean liner and soon acquired the nickname ‘the Crazy Ship’.
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Nadia Benois went there from home some days to fetch a pail of thin tasteless soup which was the best that the epicurean Benois family could now find to put on the table. It was a long walk but infinitely preferable to travelling on the overcrowded trams with the attendant risk of contracting typhoid in the epidemic which swept the city. On one such visit fate provided her with an escape route. Fifty years later, she remembered that day clearly. It was 1 June 1920:

It was a beautiful warm morning. I was walking leisurely and feasting my eyes on the grandiose view of the river … I was in a happy hazy mood.

At the House of Arts my tin can was filled with some unsavoury smelling soup and I was given a sack of potatoes. At that time of famine even unsavoury soups were acceptable. At home one added something to them, either an onion or a little butter and they became quite eatable.

I started on my return journey, one hand holding the sack of potatoes slung on to my back and the other the tin can with the soup. Walking was no pleasure now that I was so heavily laden, and the sun was getting hotter too. When I reached the Fourth Line, and I was just passing the house where my school-friend Valeria worked, I thought how nice it would be to sit down in a cool place and have a smoke.
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Valeria Poleschauk worked as a secretary for the former naval officer Nikolai Nikolaeovitch Schreiber. She had already told Nadia about the strange visitor who was living there, whom she mistakenly thought was a Dutchman. While Nadia sat on a window seat and smoked her cigarette, the Dutchman appeared. He wore high-laced leather boots, knee breeches, a white shirt and navy-blue, polka-dot tie and altogether cut a rather comic figure, she thought. But he was funny, entertaining her with jokes and double entendres. On a whim she invited him to join her at a fairground that evening and in so doing boarded the gaudy carousel of Klop Ustinov’s life.
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It was Nadia who gave him the nickname Klop soon after they first met.

Shortly before she first set eyes on Klop, Nadia and Valeria had been discussing the prospects of finding a man who would help them flee the country to start a new life. Russians needed an exit permit; girls who married foreigners stood more chance of being allowed to leave. Nadia had already had one such offer, from a neighbour she hardly knew, and was well aware of the pitfalls and potential humiliation that lay ahead for girls who gambled their future happiness on a chance encounter with a stranger. Despite their shared Russian heritage Nadia and Klop did not have a lot in common. Klop had been raised in Palestine, matured in Germany and Switzerland but was not in tune with Russian culture and, although he was fluent in several languages, Russian was not one
of them. Yet it took only a fortnight for Nadia to convince herself that marrying him was a risk she was willing to take. Many, many years later, after Klop’s death, Nadia would confess to a close friend that he represented a passport to escape the rigours of existence after the Revolution and that was a factor in her decision.
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The romance began inauspiciously. The amusement park they had planned to visit was closed and, as Klop confessed to her later, he had hoped the switchback ride would provide the opportunity for greater intimacy than would normally be permitted on a first date. But he continued to amuse and entertain. It was the time of the festival of White Nights, when the sun hardly sets and couples strolled along the banks of the Neva until the early hours of the morning and fell in love. Klop met Nadia’s various uncles and aunts, but not her parents, and visited The Hermitage to view the Benois da Vinci. With typical bravado, he took her to church and introduced her to his previous girlfriend. They went dancing at the Crazy Ship.

He knew it was only a matter of time before the authorities began to suspect that he was a spy and his proposal, when it came, was pragmatic and prosaic, anything but romantic: ‘Listen, we could be married here and when we are abroad I’d give you a divorce.’ Nadia good-naturedly fobbed him off: ‘This is of course very charming and simple but there are other matters to be taken into consideration.’